The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon (65 page)

N
ow the fate of their venture rested in the hands of one of the most unusual men ever to run the Colorado, whose path to the river had drawn him from Nazi-occupied Europe through the lakes of Argentina and then to the laboratories of UC Berkeley before he had finally found his true home on the decks of a seventeen-foot wooden dory. At age forty-nine, Petschek was by far the oldest member of the crew and thus entirely unlikely to find within himself the endurance and the drive to carry them through when his younger and stronger companions could no longer continue. He had always talked with awe about Grua’s remarkable stamina and steadiness, the astonishing manner in which the Factor was able to hold everything together because he never seemed to
grow tired—or more accurately, that despite how weary he might be, Grua was somehow able to summon from within himself a source of energy that enabled him to persevere. Which was something that he, Petschek, could try to imitate but never truly reproduce. And yet that is exactly what he set out to do now, while his companions slumbered.

Taking up the oars, he settled himself in the cockpit, braced his feet, and launched a sequence of strokes whose pacing and rhythm were calibrated to pull them through the crux of the run. There was nothing flashy or dramatic about this. He didn’t moan over the pain in his arms or lash the water with his oar blades. He simply snapped off one flawless stroke after another, quietly and without fanfare, declining to wake his friends when his twenty-minute stint was over and it was time to trade off, electing instead to continue pulling, without respite, without pause, until the night was over.

As he rowed, his thoughts turned back toward the first speed run, the shakedown to the main event, which had taken place three years earlier. On that voyage, somewhere in the lower part of the canyon,
he had shared a conversation with Wally Rist that had always stayed with him. The flat stretches between the bottom of Lava Falls and the top of 205 had lent themselves to dialogue, and Rist, who at the time was in the midst of a divorce, had been talking about the nature of happiness. And Petschek had asked—because he was genuinely puzzled by this—why so many people, Americans especially, seemed to feel that happiness was an entitlement. By dint of his own experiences as a refugee and a wanderer, Petschek found the notion to be strangely naive and immature—especially here at the bottom of a chasm whose ramparts offered such irrefutable testimony not only to the smallness of human affairs but also to the universe’s implacable indifference to those hopes and longings.

Yet right now, in a way that seemed to be crystallized by the task of shepherding his sleeping companions down this penultimate stretch,
Petschek was forced to concede that he
had
found happiness. Not as a birthright or as an entitlement, but as something that had been bequeathed by the place itself, this river and this canyon, by virtue of its strangeness, its majesty, and above all by its peculiar ability to distill the essence of those who had been drawn into its orbit—their courage and insanity, their beliefs and their delusions—into something urgent and compelling. As the last of the night cupped the river in its hands, Petschek knew in his heart that it was simply impossible to come away from an extended encounter with the greatest canyon on earth without acknowledging that human life, despite its frailty and insignificance, represents a bestowal of grace for which one has done nothing whatsoever to deserve—and that for this reason, the river world vibrated with a harrowing beauty whose principal dividends were gratitude and joy.

In this manner, alone with his thoughts in the predawn darkness, Petschek took the
Emerald Mile
through the most forlorn phase of her odyssey. Past the end of the Lower Granite Gorge at Mile 259, where the black Archean schist arrowed deep into the earth and disappeared for the last time, replaced by tawny-colored layers of Tapeats sandstone and the green-and-purple Bright Angel shale. Past Spencer Canyon and Surprise Canyon and Clay Tank Canyon and Salt Creek and Jackson Canyon and Burnt Spring Canyon, and all the other half-forgotten little tributary drainages of the western end of the Grand Canyon until, somewhere in that stretch, he took them past the point where the mighty current that had borne them all the way from Lee’s Ferry finally began to surrender its wondrous, unstoppable energy to the impounded slackwater of Lake Mead.

By now, his speed had slowed dramatically and the rowing had lost its burning fluency, drawing closer to something that resembled brute labor, the sort of duty one performs on a chain gang. But Petschek refused to quit.

He rowed them past the last of the stars. He rowed them clear of the night’s embrace. He rowed them straight into and then beyond the break of day. And somewhere along that stretch of river, he also rowed them across an invisible fault line, a seam on the American continent that separates the terrain where the ephemeral events of everyday reality unfold from a more rarefied and singular realm, the place where mythic and permanent journeys of the imagination, such as those of John Wesley Powell, reside—the place of legends.

He did not stop rowing for three solid hours.

When Grua awoke and Petschek finally conceded to lay down his oars, it was just past 8:00 a.m. and they were passing an obscure little side canyon called Tincanebits, seventeen miles from the end of the Grand Canyon.

N
ot far from the canyon’s terminus, the cliffs on the left featured an enormous cavern that, more than eleven thousand years earlier, had served as a shelter for giant, three-toed Shasta ground sloths—prehistoric creatures that had shambled lethargically around the Southwest prior to the last Ice Age before slipping into extinction. The speed run was now about to devolve into a plodding barge-pull that mirrored both the kinetics and the demeanor of the cavern’s former inhabitants. Over the next two hours, as the speed of the current slowed further with each passing mile, the needle on the
Emerald Mile
’s speedometer ebbed inexorably lower, from eight miles an hour to seven, then six, then five.

Technically, this was still the Grand Canyon, but the behavior of the river suggested something else. The appearance of midstream sandbars, the near-total absence of current, and, most telling of all, the silence that descended as
the swishes and purls that are the auditory signature of moving water faded and disappeared—all of these things indicated that the river was giving way to the uppermost tentacle of the reservoir created by Hoover Dam.

With the clock ticking against them, they would have to find some way of picking up the pace. So just before 10:00 a.m.,
Grua reached into his locker and broke out their second set of oarlocks while Petschek unlashed the spare oars. Now, instead of trading back and forth while Wren continued to sleep, both men would row in tandem.

Timing their strokes so that they pulled and recovered in unison, their speed improved somewhat, although the arrangement was exceedingly unpleasant—the boat had not really been designed to accommodate two oarsmen at once. But as they cranked out the final section, they reminded each other how lucky they were because the morning air was still and the upstream winds that often surge off the lake had not yet picked up.

They passed a large buoy with a sign announcing that farther upstream travel was off-limits to motorized boat traffic from the reservoir. They rowed past a limestone cave on the right that was occupied for thousands of years by a colony of Mexican free-tailed bats. Then, at about 11:15 a.m., the river bent sharply to the left and they rowed through a spectacular section of sandstone whose bedding had been tilted upward so sharply that the formation resembled a giant set of stone gates.

These were the Grand Wash Cliffs, and just beyond their portals the walls of the canyon fell away, replaced by the flat, flint-strewn desert along the shores of Lake Mead. As they passed through, they could see a road on the left side of the lake, snaking off into the distance. They could see the sky now too—truly see the sky—ampler and more extensive than inside the canyon, but also white and bleached, as if its vibrancy had been bled away by the removal of the canyon’s walls.

Directly ahead, a small motor launch was coming toward them across the waters of the lake, and as it drew near they could see their timekeepers, Cliff Taylor and Anne Marie Nicholson, who had made the long drive across the desert from Lee’s Ferry and kept a vigil here on the shore of the lake.

The launch circled around and drew alongside the dory as Petschek and Grua’s final strokes pulled them abreast of a rock on the left side of the reservoir that had been painted with the Lake Mead survey mark RS 273. Here, the Colorado underwent an odd change.

The current had now slowed to the point where the river could no longer hold sediment in suspension, and so the tiny particles of sand and dirt that the Colorado had been freighting all the way through the canyon began to drop out and settle toward the riverbed. As the sediment fell away, the reddish-brown
color that was the river’s hallmark abruptly disappeared and the water turned blue.

This exact spot delineated the border between the skirling dynamism of a living river and the torpor of a stagnating reservoir. It also marked the Grand Wash fault, the true end of the canyon.

Okay, wait . . .
, ordered Grua.

Wait . . .

 . . . not yet . . .

There was a long pause as the dory slid past the survey marker, then both men cried:

Now!

O
n a July morning three years earlier, when Grua, Petschek, and Wally Rist had completed their first speed run, Petschek had celebrated this same moment by
seizing his conch shell, which boatmen use to call their passengers to dinner, and blowing a piercing blast that rang across the surface of the lake. Now there was no jubilation—no whistles, no yodeling, no cowboy whoops. As Taylor wrote down the time, Grua and Petschek simply removed their hands from the oars, slumped back, and permitted their blades to drop into the water.

Each blade left a little V-shaped wake that smoothed and disappeared as the dory slowly came to a stop. Then the boat floated there, motionless and still, suspended on the shimmering threshold between a world that refused to let them go and the world to which they were once again obliged to return.

It was 11:38 a.m., and their elapsed time was thirty-six hours, thirty-eight minutes, and twenty-nine seconds.

The
Emerald Mile
had not broken the speed record. She had smashed it to pieces by more than ten hours.

The current that with gentle murmur glides

Thou knowest, being stopped, impatiently doth rage.

—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE

P
RECISELY
seven minutes after the
Emerald Mile
arrived at the Grand Wash fault and Grua laid down his oars,
the telephone rang in Tom Gamble’s office, nearly three hundred miles upstream in the visitors’ center high above the Glen Canyon Dam. The windows next to Gamble’s desk looked out on the surface of Lake Powell, and as the dam’s manager picked up the receiver, he could see
the surface of the reservoir hovering just below the tops of the plywood flashboards on the spillway gates. The runaway torrent of snowmelt racing down the Colorado hadn’t quite finished with the beleaguered team of engineers—and as Gamble was about to learn, things had just taken a turn for the worse.

On the other end of the line was Bruce Moyes in Denver, who had spent the better part of the past hour huddled with a group of colleagues staring disconsolately at the latest reports from the river forecast team in Salt Lake City.
“Hydrographs look terrible,” Phil Burgi had scribbled in his notebook, a reference to the fact that the runoff showed no sign of abating.

The purpose of Moyes’s call was to inform Gamble that yet another surge was now heading toward Lake Powell. Despite the damage that had already been inflicted on the crippled spillways, they would have to
send even more water through the tunnels and into the canyon.